Three black holes appear to be feeding inside a single galaxy seen 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, and the two nearest its centre are close enough to spiral together within roughly 700 million years — though the paper reporting them calls it evidence, not a confirmed triplet

Webb's integral field spectrograph split one lopsided hydrogen line into two, then turned up a third in the galaxy's outskirts. The mass estimates could be off by a factor of ten, and the paper's own hedges run heavier than the headlines built on it. The post Three black holes appear to be feeding inside a single galaxy seen 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, and the two nearest its centre are…